Neither. You pay one flat monthly rate — $97 your first month, then $297 a month — and that covers every call Ava answers, with no per-call count and no per-minute clock.
Per call vs flat rate answering comes down to who carries the risk of a busy month. With per-call or per-minute billing, you do. With a flat rate, the vendor does. Ava is flat: unlimited calls, month to month, no contract.
Garage door calls aren't tidy 90-second conversations. A homeowner describing a door stuck halfway takes time. A landlord with three properties takes more. Under per-minute pricing, longer calls and chatty callers inflate the bill. Under per-call pricing, spam calls and wrong numbers count the same as a booked spring replacement.
Either way, you're auditing an invoice instead of running jobs. A flat rate ends that:
The per call vs flat rate answering question is really one question: what happens to my bill when my phone rings twice as much? If the answer is "it doubles," that's not a phone service, that's a tax on growth. For a fuller look at the billing models you'll run into, read AI answering service pricing models: flat, per-minute, and per-call.
Call the live demo and have Ava call you now — hear exactly what your customers will hear when they call your shop.